Thus, reformers who pursue policy changes within the framework of the technocratic model of policy-making are caught in the crossfire of two extreme options. If they try to satisfy powerful interest groups and propose far-reaching compromises for the sake of their co-optation, these compromises may turn out to be so ineffective that the reforms do not achieve their goals. However, should the reformers outwit their opponents in the run-up to the adoption and implementation of policy programs and successfully push through their proposals, the policy changes will not be irreversible. They will potentially be easily undone by counterreforms initiated by interest groups who may restore the situation to the previous point of departure or even make it worse than the original status quo. This is why technocratic reformers often cannot limit themselves to policy-making; they must rely upon political support not only from parties and/or public opinion but also primarily from political leaders. Indeed, political leaders may be interested in successful policy reforms if these strengthen their powers and/or increase their public support. In such cases, the leaders may lead informal pro-reform policy coalitions, whether broad or narrow in nature—the recentralization of state governance in Russia in the early 2000s may serve as a prime example. 64
However, political leaders’ support for technocratic reforms is not a guarantee of policy success; even if this condition is necessary, it is not sufficient. First, leadership changes may put previous policy priorities into question (as happened in Russia with technological modernization, which was set as a top policy priority during Medvedev’s presidency). Moreover, if the personal stances of political leaders shift for one reason or another, then policy priorities can even reverse direction. For example, the move by Russia’s rulers from economic development goals to geopolitical adventures after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 put Russian technocratic reformers into a semi-peripheral position in terms of policy priorities, which had been changed by Putin almost overnight. However, even if political leaders sincerely support policy reforms over a long period of time, their list of top policy priorities is inherently limited. While they concentrate on supporting several major policy changes, the rest of the items on the policy agenda will remain of secondary importance. The other side of the coin in the success story of tax reform in Russia in the early 2000s, actively backed by Putin,65 was the failure or at least limited advancement of several other policy reforms.
The support of political leaders is vitally important for technocrats because it gives them leverage for overcoming resistance to policy reforms by powerful interest groups. Sometimes, even this support is not enough; strong and embedded interest groups can divert policy changes in a different direction. This is what happened with police reform in Russia in the early 2010s: despite open and loud public discussion (or perhaps courtesy of this discussion) the outcome of the reform was essentially limited to window dressing and the reshuffling of some personnel.66 And even if political leaders reduce interest groups’ resistance to policy changes, technocrats are rarely able to impose control over the bureaucrats in charge of implementing policy—especially if these policies require interaction and effective coordination of various agencies.67 It is not by chance that while the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank of Russia were able to conduct successful macroeconomic policies, target inflation, and implement tax reforms,68 welfare policies in Russia were conducted in “muddling through” mode and/or merely redistributed federal state subsidies.69 The main difference was that governing state finance and policy reforms in this area depended on decisions made by a narrow circle of technocrats, and their formal and informal coordination enabled prudent policies; whereas welfare policies required complex coordination not of several persons but of various state agencies on both national and subnational levels. Given the poor quality of the bureaucracy and weak incentives for reforms, it was exceedingly difficult to achieve sustainable coordination, and even the efforts of the technocrats and political leaders were not enough to resolve these issues.
It is thus unsurprising that to technocrats, the most attractive mechanism for implementing policy reforms is the creation of pockets of efficiency—separate organizations with large funding and discretion that can play according to special rules of the game, beyond general principles of state regulations and have more room for maneuvering in conducting policy reforms. For example, implementing large-scale privatization of state enterprises in Russia in the 1990s became possible only because of the establishment of the State Property Committee (Goskomimushchestvo), a powerful vertically integrated agency that had the exclusive right to organize the sale of state assets and was controlled by the team of technocratic reformers led by Chubais.70 Despite the fact that the central government of Russia in the 1990s had weak leverages of control vis-à-vis regional authorities, Goskomimushchestvo, using the sticks of threats and the carrots of bonuses, was able to conduct a federal program of privatization in most of Russia’s regions (with some notable exceptions such as Moscow City and Tatarstan). Moreover, Goskomimushchestvo, using various tricks, was not only able to squeeze legal approval of its proposals through government, parliament, and the presidential administration, but also to acquire broad discretion in its activities, thus becoming a “state within the state.”71 However, after the end of privatization and Chubais’s following removal from several top positions in the government, the influence of Goskomimushchestvo and its successor agencies greatly declined. The formal institutionalization of pockets of efficiency may be supplemented by informal mechanisms of their patronage by political leaders who may support their beloved pet projects in various areas. There are many examples of such projects,72 and some of them have brought certain positive effects. Overall, however, political patronage is vulnerable as a mechanism for promotion of policy reforms because of its informal nature and dependence on political circumstances.
To summarize, one might argue that the imperfect technocratic model of policy-making cannot preserve many reforms (even under favorable political conditions) from partial and inconsistent implementation, emasculation, major revision, or even complete reversal. In the case of the political model, parties and their leaders can correct errors after certain policy failures and relaunch policy reforms under new conditions during one of the subsequent political business cycles. But for technocratic reformers, whose professional credibility depends on their reputation in the eyes of their bosses—namely political leaders—a second chance may never come. This fact produces incentives to use windows of opportunity only to conduct those policy reforms that can bring immediate positive effects. Conversely, policy changes oriented toward long-term advancements may be postponed or result in unworkable compromises. Against the background of the success story of tax reform in Russia in the early 2000s,73 the failure of the pension reform launched during the same period74 is a telling example. Changes in the tax system benefited the Russian state and its rulers soon after inception in the early 2000s; whereas the pension reform assumed benefits only in the long run and generated costs for individuals and companies because of the proposed transition to an accumulative pension system and the increase in the age of retirement. Since the technocratic reformers and political leaders who had initially supported the reforms had little interest in adopting and implementing policies that might only bring significant returns decades later, and the bureaucracy as a veto player insisted on preservation of the status quo, debates on pension reform resulted in a compromise aiming to satisfy the major actors. A partial and contradictory 2002 pension reform did not solve any problems but only postponed them, even though the conditions for major changes seem to have become less and less favorable over time. Overall, however, the choice of short-term priorities for policy reform reflected the fact that many post-Soviet leaders have tended to behave, in Olson’s terms, as “roving” rather than “stationary” bandits.75 Their horizons of policy planning have rarely exceeded the next election cycle, while transitions to hereditary succession of power are unlikely.